Healthy Ways to Work in Health Care: A Self Care Guideby Martin Helldorfer and Terri Moss

Healthy Ways to Work in Health Care: A Self Care Guide is a thoughtful balance of research-based information and reflective, interactive activities dedicated to inspiring health care providers to create a healthy, balanced and meaningful work life. This beautiful, inspirational, gift-quality book includes step-by-step tips and space for journaling, making it an intensely practical tool for nurse and clinical team development.

Healthy Ways to Work in Health Care helps readers identify the "right" job by gently guiding them through the current thinking on how work attitudes and behaviors are formed and encouraging specific reflective and journaling activities. Case studies and inspirational reflections on healing with heart rekindle spirit and support readers throughout their journey.

Why Do I Work the Way I Do?

If you are asking this question, Healthy Ways to Work in Health Care will guide you to the answer. Healthy Ways to Work in Health Care identifies three unhealthy work behaviors—work fixation, work addiction, and work exhaustion— and offers tips to transform your work into a balanced, healthy, and meaningful expression of your life.

The goal of this book is to help health care providers be faithful to themselves as they care for others. It is about remembering the delicate task of nurturing the inward lives of dedicated and engaged caregivers. It is written for those who feel the need to reflect and think about themselves while also being present to care for others. This book will appeal to health care professionals who understand the importance of presence and are ready to ask themselves these questions:

Is this what I want to do?

Am I caring for myself?

What is it that is asked of me at this time in my life?

Excerpt from Healthy Ways to Work in Health Care ... on Work Fixated People

Work-fixated doers can't rest contemplatively with the world as it is. An elk silently eating in a meadow at dusk, love between two persons, the understanding look shared by a patient and caregiver…these are lost on work-fixated doers. No amount of doing will yield, or open them up to, the secrets and immense sense of beauty and heightened spiritual awareness that the being side of life offers.

The difference between doing and being is especially pronounced in health care settings. For instance, a work-fixated nurse may approach a pediatric patient diagnostically; she knows what he needs medically and provides it. Another nurse, however, is awakened when she enters the room to find the child's mother tearfully comforting him. Touched, the nurse stands motionless and appreciatively so as not to interrupt that tender moment. The work-fixated nurse can't make the switch from doing to being.

An organization's cultural shift to support improved patient care, greater patient satisfaction, and high functioning teams begins one employee at a time. Healthy Ways to Work in Health Care is a tool for individuals and teams to improve patient care and employee and patient satisfaction.